by Tim Lebbon
Time passed them by, and the creature did not flag. It grumbled now and then, groaned as Lucien twisted his sword or Kosar edged it a fraction to the left or right, but whatever the Pace beetles had given it did not fade away. Kosar noticed spatters of moisture on his face and thought it had begun to rain, but when he looked closer he could see that the animal was foaming at the mouth. He wiped a gob of spittle from his cheek; it was pink with blood. The animal moaned some more, its call starting to sound desperate.
“You’re killing it,” Kosar said. The Monk did not reply.
Always conscious of the movement, smelling the heat of the creature above the more subtle aroma of desert spices, hearing its pain but never sensing it slowing down, Kosar drifted away.
THE MOL’STERIA DESERT is part of our border, A’Meer said. They were outside the Broken Arm tavern in Pavisse, sitting on its crumbling windowsill and drinking Old Bastard from battered metal tankards. Kosar remembered the day well. It had been hot and dry, and he and A’Meer had drunk all day and fucked all night. It was at the time when their lives could have changed drastically. If Kosar had not packed and left three weeks later without saying why, the future would have been a very different place. We have Sordon Sound to the north, A’Meer continued, and Ventgoria and the Poison Forests past that. And the desert itself…it’s not the best of places, Kosar. It’s dangerous. Shantasi warriors have gone out there and never come back. The desert is a whole world, and the surface you see is only a small part of it.
So New Shanti is impregnable, Kosar said. Back then he hadn’t known that A’Meer was a Shantasi warrior. He believed she had left of her own accord, and mixing with a Shantasi excited him. Many people did not like them. Few trusted them, and some called them whiters because of the paleness of their skin. Right then, he was beginning to believe that maybe he loved her.
She drank more ale. Her skin never darkened even in such intense sunlight. Her black hair was loose today, flowing down over shoulders that he would be biting and scratching later that night. This memory was a full, rich place, echoing with the future as well as that moment in time. She opened her mouth to speak, and for an instant she seemed to gape, echoing the mimic’s representation of her.
Not impregnable, she said. But safe.
Then why did you leave?
She smiled at him. Where’s the fun in safe? And he saw a wealth of experience and knowledge in her eyes that he knew he would never match.
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER place, another mug of ale. They sat on a quay beside the river in Pavisse, watching fishing boats bring in their meager catch and the fishermen haul them ashore. Some fish were dead and stinking already, while others were mutated. The fishermen carried small knives to kill those that were wrong, slicing them in two and throwing them back into the River Pav. They produced a slick of all that was foul with the land.
Look at that, Kosar said. He was more than a little drunk. His fingers were hurting a lot that day, and sometimes alcohol dulled the pain. A’Meer could do that too. She had a special way of soothing his fingers, and later she would do it for him. Just look at that! People eat stuff from that river. Can you believe it? Would you?
You eat sheebok meat, Kosar.
Yes, but the sheebok I see aren’t all twisted up like that.
Aren’t they? Many have three horns. There’s a herd in a farm north of Pavisse with four eyes each.
But their meat’s still fine.
Is it?
Kosar stared at her, and for a moment her wisdom annoyed him. She always seemed to know what was best. Perhaps he wastoo drunk.
Well, it’s all we have, he said.
Yes. All we have. But maybe someday things will change.
Kosar spat into the river. A dead fish with beaks instead of eyes floated by. Nothing will change, he said. Noreela is dying. There’s a cancer in its soul, and it’s dying.
Think positive, lover, A’Meer said, and she leaned over and bled his anger with a kiss. There’s always hope. You just have to watch for it, and grab it while you can.
HE DREAMED OF A’Meer for a long time. Sometimes they were honest memories of what had happened and how things had been, other times they were tainted with his knowledge of everything that would come to pass. She spoke to him and smiled, groaned as she bent over a chair, offering herself to him, and she gave him her wisdom and hope whether he liked it or not. Usually he did not. But it stuck, mostly in places he did not recognize. And even though each successive dream became darker with the knowledge of her impending death at the hands of Lucien Malini, Kosar reveled in these memories. It was as though he had been given one final moment with her. He made it count. I love you, he thought many times over, and her eyes lit up throughout his memory to show him that for her, the same was true.
SOMETHING BROUGHT KOSAR out of his deep sleep. He was watching A’Meer prepare a rabbit for cooking and then the rabbit grunted, loud and hard. He felt the dream recede and reality reassert itself around him, and another loud grunt forced his eyes open.
He was still lying atop of the creature, and it was running at full speed along the base of a low ravine. It dodged this way and that, passing around rocks tumbled from the ravine walls and leaping the long-dried streambed.
“Attack,” a voice whispered. Kosar sat up, turned around and saw the Monk pulling an arrow from his hip. He hissed as the barbed head came out.
“Who?” But he did not have to ask. Ahead and to the right, halfway up the ravine’s slope, A’Meer rose from behind a rock and fired an arrow at them.
Kosar was too astonished to duck. The arrow glanced from the animal’s bony forehead and tumbled into the night. He searched for A’Meer but she had already vanished. He saw a flash of movement farther along the ravine as something crossed from right to left. He squinted, saw another movement from the corner of his eye and turned left to see A’Meer stepping into view. She raised a crossbow and fired, and below him the creature jumped and grumbled in pain.
“A’Meer!” Kosar shouted, confused by his dream memories, but he knew that he was wrong. These Shantasi were not A’Meer. Something flashed across the ravine a few steps ahead of the galloping creature, waited until they were close and then leapt onto its back. Kosar hardly had time to perceive the movement before a male Shantasi stood astride him. The warrior held one arm out for support and raised a sword in his other.
“We’re here to see the Mystics!” Kosar shouted, but the Shantasi’s eyes did not change. He brought the sword down.
Sparks flew as Lucien blocked the blow with his own sword. The Monk shoved hard and the Shantasi tumbled from the creature, disappearing in a cloud of dust.
“We don’t have long!” Lucien said.
“We’re no enemy!” Kosar shouted. Red Monk, he thought. They’ll see me with him and kill me without asking questions. “Lucien, don’t fight back,” he said. He stood, holding on to his looped belt with one hand, knees bent as he braced himself on the running animal’s back.
Two crossbow bolts whizzed past his head from different directions. He saw movement on both sides of the ravine, but he could not focus. Using their Pace, he thought. We don’t have a chance.
“We bring hope,” he shouted. “We need to see the Mystics! The Mages are here, but we have an advantage. Kill us and you’ll never know what that was.”
He saw something ahead, and for a moment it confused Kosar. Straight lines did not belong in this place. It was only a second before the creature ran into the taut rope that he realized what it was.
The animal’s legs were snapped from beneath it, and Kosar and Lucien flew from its back. For a second Kosar was flying, then the ground pulled him down and he tried to curl in his arms and legs, folding his head in his arms, wondering whether his broken body could take any more abuse before giving out entirely.
He did not even recall hitting the ground.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
Kosar opened his eyes and stared up into the face of a Shantasi warrior. She was bigger th
an A’Meer had been, her pale face divided with a diagonal scar that ran from the corner of her left eye and sliced her lips in two. Her dark hair was cropped short.
“Kosar,” he said.
“Thief?”
He nodded. She had seen his hands.
“Did you steal that Shantasi sword on your hip?”
“No, I was given it by a friend.”
“What friend?”
“A’Meer Pott. A Shantasi warrior.”
“And where is she now?”
“Dead.”
The Shantasi blinked. “You travel with a Red Monk.” There was more surprise than accusation in her voice, and Kosar thought, Perhaps I stand a chance.
“He’s one of the last,” Kosar said. Talking hurt. He tried to move, figure out where else he was hurt, but the Shantasi leaned in and pressed the point of a sword into the hollow of his throat.
“Move and you die! Now…the Monk. We’re close to killing it, but my squad is intrigued.”
“Don’t kill him,” Kosar said. “He’s one of the last, and his meaning has changed.”
“Magic is back. Dark magic. What meaning does a Monk have left in this world?”
Kosar realized that as well as angry and committed, this Shantasi was scared. “To fight that dark magic,” he said. “To defeat the Mages. There’s another hope, another chance for the land. The Monk and I have come here to meet your Mystics, and ask for help.”
“You’re speaking riddles!” the Shantasi said. She shouted something to the soldiers around her, a few terse words in their staccato language. Then she leaned close and Kosar could smell her breath, a curious mix of spice and staleness that gave him a sudden flashback to A’Meer.
“I hear your knives knocking together,” he said. “A’Meer wore her weapons so that none of them ever touched.”
The Shantasi blinked again, processing what had happened and what Kosar had said. He saw the doubt in her eyes, and the reluctance to believe. We’re not killers, A’Meer had told him. We’re not a warrior race. It was thrust upon us.
“How is Lucien?” he asked.
“Lucien?”
“The Monk.”
The Shantasi glanced away, then back again. “Alive,” she said.
“Will you give me a chance?” he asked. “Please? A’Meer died for magic, and I swear that it’s not all over. The Mages have their magic, and I suspect their army is ashore and heading this way even now.”
“We know that,” the warrior said.
“Then you can help. I need to see a Mystic. To tell them. And they will know if I tell the truth, won’t they?”
“They have ways of knowing,” she said.
Kosar thought of the beetle in his throat and shivered.
“You’re hurt,” the Shantasi said. “I’ll carry you.”
“No, I-” Kosar went to stand but the warrior had already grabbed him beneath the arms. She knelt, lifted and stood with him slung over one shoulder.
Kosar groaned as his broken ribs ground together. “How far?” he asked.
“Not far.” The Shantasi issued orders to the rest of her squad. Kosar saw at least eight other warriors, and he wondered how he and Lucien had ever survived. They were trying to bring us down, he thought, not kill us. They were intrigued: a man and a Red Monk traveling together on the back of that desert beast. The creature was dead, a still shadow back along the ravine. If I’d been on my own…
“What’s your name?” Kosar asked.
“Nothing to you.” The Shantasi started walking. Each step jarred Kosar’s cracked ribs, and he was glad when unconsciousness took him away once again.
HE CAME TO when the Shantasi lowered him from her back and propped him against a rock. She was panting and sweating, but she still looked strong. He noticed that she now moved silently; she had retied some of her weaponry.
“Thanks for the lift,” Kosar said. He breathed in deeply, and the inside of his nose prickled with the warm aroma of desert spices. The smell gave him an unaccountable sense of well-being. He looked around. Behind him rose a steep, short hill, shifting here and there where Shantasi moved across its face. Lucien was thirty steps to his left, sitting with his head bowed and his hood pulled down. Three Shantasi stood around him, arrows strung, belts gleaming with weapons. He looked like a helpless old man. He seemed to sense Kosar watching because he glanced up. Kosar looked away.
Ahead of him, the desert. He could see the silhouette of a spice farm. Distance was difficult to judge in such light, but he guessed that it was at least several hundred steps away, a complex network of rods and ropes high above the desert. He could see the shadings of leaves and the webbing of stems and stalks, and he wondered whether the desert spice could survive this dearth of sunlight. A’Meer had once told him about a harvest, how the Shantasi climbed through the supports and across the rope rigging to gather leaves and seed pods, and he felt suddenly sad seeing this farm empty and abandoned.
“Are the farms still alive?” he asked.
The big Shantasi woman wiped a slick of sweat from her face. She followed his gaze, looked back at Kosar. “What do you care? Damned Noreelan, what do you give a fuck about us?”
“You’re as much a Noreelan as I.”
“Pah!” The warrior shook her head and turned away. “We make a new home for ourselves, and still it doesn’t last.”
“You’ve been here for so long,” he said. “You’re a part of the land.”
The Shantasi turned back to him, her anger lessened now. She spoke to him like a child; Kosar was not sure which he preferred. “Thief, none of us are part of the land.”
“So what now?” he asked. “I need to speak to someone. Can you take me to Hess? To the Mystic Temple? There’s something-”
“There’s hope,” a voice said. Older, lower than the warrior who had carried him here. The Shantasi performed a brief bow with her head and backed away, leaving room for a man to squat on the sand before Kosar.
“IS THAT WHAT you came to tell me, thief? That there’s hope? You ride across a desert of dying spice farms, under a twilit sky that hasn’t changed in days, accompanied by a Red Monk that has enough wounds to kill a dozen Shantasi…to tell me there’s hope?”
“The Monk is Lucien Malini. His being with me should show you that things have changed.”
The man nodded. “Things have changed, for sure. The Elder Mystics have killed themselves, the others have fled deep into New Shanti. Hess is a city of ghosts and memories, and dead things that still move. Yes, things have changed.” He bowed his head and fisted both hands together.
“I’m sorry,” Kosar said.
The Mystic glanced up and smiled. He looked embattled and desperate, but the smile touched his eyes. Kosar could not help returning the gesture, because A’Meer used to smile like that.
“I’m O’Gan Pentle,” the man said. “I think you’ve guessed that I’m a Mystic. A young one, comparatively.” He leaned forward. “Are you a spy for the Mages?”
“No,” Kosar said.
“Is there something in you?”
“No.”
“Then the hope you bring us…tell me. I have hope of my own, and I’d be interested to hear whether they’re of the same ilk.”
“I need a drink,” Kosar said. “And the Monk will need food and drink also.”
O’Gan glanced across at the Monk, frowning. “Monks are our enemies,” he said.
“Yes, they used to be.”
O’Gan stared at Kosar for a long time. The thief looked down at his bloodied fingertips, but still he felt the Mystic’s attention upon him. “Things have changed,” the Mystic whispered. “Bring some water and food,” he said, louder. “And feed the Monk.”
“Mystic?” The Shantasi warrior sounded amazed.
“Feed it. And give it water. Things have changed, O’Lam.”
The warrior nodded, gave the brief bow again and went to fetch food and drink.
“It was A’Meer,” Kosar said. He was still staring
at his hands, remembering how the mimics had shown him his lover’s last moments. It was a painful memory, but one he felt he had to share now. It was almost like bringing her death home. “I’d left the others, I wasrunning away, when the mimics showed me A’Meer. And that made it clear to me. It solidified what the librarian said, what Hope claimed, and-”
“A’Meer Pott,” O’Gan said.
Kosar glanced up and saw the Mystic’s eyes grow wide, staring at some past memory.
“‘Hope,’ she said to me,” O’Gan continued. “She spoke the language of the land, and she told me ‘Hope,’ but none of the Elders believed me. Their memories are tainted by what came before. They see only the bad. But there has to be good as well.”
“There is,” Kosar said, confused but invigorated. “Her name is Alishia.”
HE TOLD O’GAN of Alishia, Hope and Trey, traveling southward for Kang Kang and the Womb of the Land. He told him of Rafe Baburn and what the boy had carried; their flight south; the pursuit by the Red Monks and their battle in the machines’ graveyard. He glanced sideways at Lucien, trying not to imagine the Monk using his sword to end A’Meer’s life. And finally he told O’Gan why he had come to New Shanti.
“They need time,” Kosar said. “To reach Kang Kang and find the Womb of the Land. And they need protecting.”
“And what happens if they get there?” O’Gan asked.
Kosar shrugged. “You’re a Mystic. I’m just a thief. Don’t you know?”
O’Gan shook his head.
“Alishia thinks she can do something,” Kosar said.
“In Kang Kang? That’s a bad place. They’ll be killed before they get farther than its foothills.”
Kosar closed his eyes. I wish I could believe that isn’t true, he thought. I wish I could believe that Noreela itself is guarding them and guiding them. But Rafe followed that voice in his mind, and still the Mages won.
“There are no guarantees,” Kosar said. “Nothing’s written. We write history with every breath we take.”
